


A Poster Child Prodigy

by SeleneJessabelle12626



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Ambigious timeline, Anxiety, Dealing With Trauma, F/M, Far from home, Fluff and Angst, More like Peter and the Terrible No Good Very Bad week, Peter dealing with the aftermath, Post-Spider-Man: Far From Home, Snippets, Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie), Spider-Man: Far From Home Compliant, Spider-Man: Far From Home mid-credits scene compliant, sorry...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 14:39:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19792993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeleneJessabelle12626/pseuds/SeleneJessabelle12626
Summary: Peter had taken to wearing the glasses.





	A Poster Child Prodigy

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the story I had planned when I walked out of Far From Home, but I like what it became.

Peter had taken to wearing the glasses. 

Ever since the moment he put them on at the bridge, they’ve stayed in place. He couldn’t bear losing them again after what had happened. Happy says nothing about them as he treats Peter’s injuries, working carefully around the frames. When he gets into the shower to wash the grime and blood from himself, he sets the glasses on the shelf, keeping them in sight, just in case. They go back into place on his nose the moment the water turns off. When he reunites with his class, making some barely believable excuse about why he’s so beat up (that MJ backs up, man he likes her alot), no one comments on the glasses either. They head to the airport and a few hours later are on a plane back home. 

Even though MJ knows now and Peter wants to tell her everything, he can’t bring himself to tell her how many times he’s had EDITH scan to make sure everything around him is real. That he flinches every time he catches his reflection, scared it will jump out at him. That he isn’t holding her hand simply because he wants to, but because it’s solid tangible proof that she is real. 

They watch a movie together on the plane, the same way he’d planned on the way to Europe and she falls asleep on his shoulder. He sleeps for a little bit but they hit a patch of turbulence and he wakes up from a nightmare of the ground giving way beneath him.

When they land, he slips the glasses into the collar of his shirt, the bridge of his nose aching slightly from having worn them so long. Besides, May would ask too many questions he wasn’t ready to answer yet if she saw him wearing what were clearly Tony’s glasses. 

“I’ll call you later?” He tells MJ as they approach their waiting families. 

“You’d better.” She smirks, giving him a quick hug before walking over to greet her family. 

He has EDITH run a scan for drones, just in case.

~

“Happy give you those?” May asks when Peter comes out of his room wearing the glasses.

“Uh, Fury actually.” He hates that he sounds almost ashamed to say it. Happy had told May the basics of what had happened in Europe but not the details. Not how he had been the one to hand over EDITH or how naive and trusting he’d been in a complete stranger and nearly had gotten the world (or at least part of Europe) destroyed because of it.

“They look good.” She smiles.

He has EDITH run a scan for drones, just in case. 

~

When he stops mid-patrol to take a break on his favorite rooftop, he digs around in his bag to take out a granola bar, a bottle of water and the glasses case. He’d run a scan before leaving the apartment, and he knew that Quintin was dead but he has EDITH run a scan for drones, just in case.

~

He takes MJ on a proper date. She’s wearing the broken Black Dahlia necklace, he’s wearing the glasses. They walk around a park and just talk. He buys her a flower from a vendor on the street. He kisses her on her doorstep when he takes her home.

He has EDITH run a scan for drones, just in case.

~

He goes to Ned’s to work on a LEGO model of one of the Giant AT-AT walkers from Empire Strikes Back. They don’t talk about Europe despite Ned clearly wanting to. Ned runs to get a drink from the kitchen. Peter is alone in the room with a pile of LEGO and a half-built walker in front of him.

He has EDITH run a scan for drones, just in case.

~

He used to take the train to get around on patrol, riding on top like it was his own personal chauffeur. Now his stomach turns and body aches if he so much as hears one go by. It makes living in the heart of Queens a bit difficult. He tries to cure himself of his newly ~~found~~ developed fear by exposure. He watches the trains pass and tries to ignore the way his hands shake and his ribs suddenly feel like they’ve been crushed. He knows the trains are real. That he had really been hit by one. That he had absolutely zero desire to ever experience that again. He watches the trains slow at one of the stations on the elevated line. He watches people get on and off. He watches the trains pull away a few minutes later.

He has EDITH run a scan for drones, just in case.

~

MJ comes over and he promises to answer any of her questions about Spider-man. She asks questions he expects. How he got the powers, when he got the powers, what exactly can he do and so on. She asks about Homecoming, just a very simple “What was up with Homecoming?” He tells her the whole story. She’s quiet for a little bit, thoughtfully looking at the Iron Spider charging chamber. “You got snapped.” She states and he nods. It was pretty obvious who did and didn’t get snapped. “People saw Spider-man fighting alongside Iron Man and that wizard guy when that spaceship showed up.” He nods again. “You wanna talk about all that?” He knows she means the whole thing with Thanos despite not knowing the full extent of it all, none of the public knew the full extent of it all. 

“Not really.” He admits. Though deep down he was sure he would still tell her what he could if she really wanted to know. She shrugs and asks if he’d met Black Widow. Her crush on the assassin wasn’t exactly the world’s best kept secret. Germany is still supposed to be classified, despite Ned knowing about it. He tells her that he had met Natasha and that she was just as cool as MJ thought. The smirk on her face almost makes him want to say more about Germany but he’d learned his lesson about sharing too much with civilians. After the Snap and the subsequent Blip, the accords had kind of lost their importance but as far as Peter knew Ross was still alive and still wanted them, himself and all the others to be known to the public if not in jail. So he decided to keep MJ fully in the dark. 

May takes them out for Thai for dinner. Peter walks MJ back to her apartment and swings back home afterwards. 

He feels lighter somehow, after talking about everything. He slips the glasses into his bag that he takes on patrol but gets too caught up with stopping a robbery to remember to take them out. He’s laying in bed about to fall asleep when he realizes he hadn’t spoken to EDITH once today. 

~

He woke up to the feeling of the glasses smushed against his face, strands of MJ’s hair in his mouth and May’s voice in her bedroom. “Hello is this Michelle Jones’s mother?” “Hi, this is May Parker, Peter’s aunt. I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to have MJ stay the night, they fell asleep watching a movie and I don’t want to send her home at this hour.” “Yes, I’ll have her call you in the morning.” “Uh huh, goodnight.” He shut his eyes quickly, feigning sleep as he heard her quiet footsteps approaching, ready to fake grogginess when she woke them up to ‘suggest’ they move to a bed. Instead he felt the glasses slip from his face, heard the barely audible ‘tap’ of their frame being set on the wooden side table, the comforting plush weight of a blanket settling over him and the gentle press of May’s lips against the crown of his head. MJ stirred a little, curling further into him and Peter let out a yawn, deciding trying to sleep wouldn’t hurt. 

“Thanks May.” He muttered.

“Anytime Kiddo.” She whispered back. 

~

Happy calls while he’s at MJ’s. He’s babysitting Morgan and she wanted to talk to Peter. MJ waits patiently with an amused smirk on her face while Morgan talks and talks at Peter about whatever chaos she’d convinced Happy to participate in. He’s somewhat listening to what she's saying but mostly giving MJ an apologetic look over the top of his phone. 

“Petey when did you get Daddy’s glasses?” 

Peter abruptly focuses back on Morgan and blinks a few times in surprise, looking at the window that shows himself on the video call. He’s wearing the glasses, he practically always is nowadays. 

He hears Happy clear his throat on the other end as if he’s about to make some sort of excuse for Peter but then says “He gave them to me, well he gave them to someone else to give to me.” He’s speaking slow, he knows he is but he’s trying to find the words he wants to say. 

Pepper had said that he was as much as their, her and Tony’s son, as Morgan was their daughter. He’d tried his best to live up to it, to be an at least half decent ‘brother’ for Morgan. May thought it was cute and fully encouraged him, Ned was the same. This was really the first time MJ had really seen or heard Morgan, being new to the whole Spider-man/superhero thing. 

“You look like Daddy.” She confirms with a smile, innocent to all the trouble he’d caused because of the glasses. 

“High praise” He forces out, trying his best to ignore the pity in MJ’s eyes. 

“She’s right you know” MJ starts when he gets off the phone. “You do look like him.” 

He’d had the ‘He’d be proud of you talk’ with Happy and an abbreviated version with May and he knows that people still want him to be the new Iron Man even if there is no way he ever could be. 

“But promise me that you’re not going to try and be him.” She says with the same matter-of-fact ‘I’m being serious but don’t want you to comment on it’ voice she uses with him when he feels guilty about superhero stuff. “You’re way cooler than him.” 

It earns her a chuckle and she smirks at him in reply. He uses his phone to look at himself and admits “I guess they do make me look a bit like him.” 

He doesn’t use EDITH at all that day. 

~

“So then were you actually his intern?” MJ asks out of the blue. They’re walking back to her place after a coffee run. 

“What?” Peter asks in confusion but then realizes what she’d said and shrugs “I mean yeah. I did intern stuff.”

“Intern stuff?” She questions incredulously.

“Yeah you know, got coffee and stuff like that.” She still looks unimpressed. 

“Gonna give you a minute to decide if you’re going to stick to that story.” 

He relents less than 60 seconds later. “It was mostly just messing around in his lab. The whole intern thing was an excuse for May so Mr. Stark could take me to Germany. After that it was just like an excuse to work on my suit and his tech, stuff like that.” He admits and she smirks.

“Tell me about him.” She says casually and he hesitates, glasses suddenly heavy on his face.

He’d broken every New Yorker rule and stopped on the sidewalk, but she hasn’t, so he hurries to catch up. He takes a minute to gather his thoughts but eventually says “Well Mr. Stark was a lot like you saw on TV but when it was just us he was just like the best-”

He realizes long after they’d gotten back to her apartment, coffees finished and sat together on the floor with a deck of cards between them, that he’d been talking for over an hour and MJ hadn’t said a single thing besides ask questions to encourage him to keep talking. She really was the best.

“MJ? I think I want to kiss you right now if that’s okay.”

EDITH get set aside until he leaves through her window another hour later.

~

“You don’t wear the glasses as Spider-man right? Because that’d be like a dead giveaway as to who you are.” Ned is over helping him with some of the programming on the suit he’d made in Europe, Peter has the glasses on and is scrolling through Mr. Starks Spider-man protocols. 

“I used to put them on when I took breaks on patrol, but you know KAREN? The AI in my suit?”

“Yeah?”

“I figured out how to have her interface with EDITH so I don’t have to anymore. I just bring them with me and she does the rest.” 

“That’s so cool!”

~

“MJ?” he asks tentatively.

She looks up from her book with a questioning expression. 

“Why do you keep asking me about Mr. Stark?” 

She shrugs and with the same confident ease he loves her for says “Helps to talk. You’re not gonna do it on your own and no offense to Ned or your Aunt but you don’t need pity and comfort, you just need someone to listen. Why not me?” He doesn’t say anything for a long moment and her expression softens “I’ll stop if-”

“No” he smiles a little “You’re right. It, helps.” 

“See. Now fix your web-thingy, I am not trusting it to carry both our weight until you fix it.” 

She earns a laugh and a joking salute. EDITH stays folded on his nightstand when he leaves his room to prove to her the web is strong enough.

_~_

_“On my way!”_

“ _Don’t text and swing!”_

He picks her up beneath the Avengers Memorial Bridge way out in Manhattan. He may be Queen’s friendly neighborhood Spider-man but it didn’t hurt to add another layer of secrecy to his identity, especially when MJ was involved. For all the public knew he lived in Manhattan but worked out of Queens. 

He has the time of his life despite her protests.

He really feels like Spider-man for the first time since Tony died when he’s standing in Times Square and people don’t ask him questions about Iron Man, they yell for pictures of him and autographs from him and Iron Man isn’t mentioned once. 

And then Quintin reared his head one last time and for the first time Peter hopes this is all an illusion. Desperately hopes that this isn’t real. That this isn’t happening.

“K-KAREN?” 

_“Yes Peter?”_

“Run EDITH inter-interface please.”

_“Hello Peter.”_

“EDITH Scan-Scan for drones please.” He silently begs to be wrong, for this to be fake, but his heart stops when EDITH replies.

_“There are no drones active at this time.”_

  


**Author's Note:**

> Title from Neptune by Sleeping At Last


End file.
